Intercell interference is a common problem in cellular communication systems. For example, in a Long Term Evolution (LTE) network, mobile devices in other cells cause intercell interference by transmitting on the LTE uplink at the same time and frequency. Intercell interference is partially mitigated by spatially combining multiple receive antennas. Since direct knowledge of the interfering signals is not known, these spatial techniques rely on techniques that do not model the interference directly. Modeling the interference directly can yield a significant improvement in suppressing intercell interference.
One method of suppressing intercell interference is to explicitly have knowledge of the transmit parameters of the intercell users and thereby have knowledge of a reference signal in the interfering transmission. With this knowledge, multi-user parameter estimation and multi-user detection algorithms can jointly model the intracell and intercell users, providing significant improvement in intercell interference rejection.
Conventional methods for directly modelling intercell signals requires the explicit sharing of all information so that the transmit parameters for an interfering signal are known ahead of time. However, explicitly sharing this much information requires a high throughput, low latency link between cells, making it impractical and too expensive to deploy in many cases.
Accordingly, there exists a need for improved methods, systems, and computer program products for determining a reference signal for an intercell interfering signal received from a mobile device.